Hi Everyone!

I hope you are having a great summer break! Here is some information that I would like to pass along.

Next month, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) will be hosting a LawSchool Forum  in Washington DC for prospective law students.

LSAC Law School Forums are the only events that allow prospective lawstudents to chat with up to 185 ABA-approved law school representatives in one convenient setting. Attendees also have the ability to go to exclusive workshops, including About the LSAT (Meet an LSAT Developer), Financing a Legal Education, The Application Process, Diversity Information Panel, and more.

All LSAC Law School Forums are free to attend. Each year, thousands of prospective law school students attend the forums, which make them great networking events.

I have attached a flier provides dates and how to sign up. If this interests you, please check out the website.

See you in fall!

When the unrest swelled again in Baltimore on Monday, April 27th, 2015, UMBC was in the midst of studying for final exams and preparing for the end of the semester. For many, the Uprising seemed well removed from our campus, as a perceived sense of distance from the city belies the significance of the ‘B’ in UMBC. Aside from periodically checking the local news updates or receiving a swell of calls and messages from concerned relatives on Facebook, studying and campus night life went on as usual. For some students, the reality of a Baltimore in chaos mere miles away didn’t sink in until they saw fires burning from the 7th floor of Albin O. Kuhn Library.

But for many others, those fires were burning our city—our home.

As members of the Critical Social Justice team unpacked the events that transpired in Baltimore, we struggled to find balance in the divide between the university and Baltimore. The divide, for example, between staying at home in the city to engage in a movement for Black lives or leaving the city for UMBC to create healing spaces, meet with students in need, and challenge those who had yet to understand the complexities and vast differences between riots and uprisings. The reality of an “us” and a “them” felt very real as we navigated back and forth on campus during those next few days. While on campus, it was easy to think through theory, strategize, and simply talk about Baltimore in the abstract; however, at night with the sounds of helicopters and sirens invading through our windows, we desperately needed our other UMBC community members to think beyond Hilltop Circle.

Baltimore City and the pervasive violence and injustice there can no longer be talked about in the abstract. Whether or not Baltimore is your home, Critical Social Justice calls each of us in this privileged community of higher education to think and engage critically about Baltimore. We cannot only think about the city when we see a fire from the library or when the Ravens win the Super Bowl. Much like Critical Social Justice is a year-long campaign, our critical thinking, action, and care for Baltimore must happen all 365 days a year.

This year’s Critical Social Justice initiative aims to create space and learning opportunities to consider the ways we can cultivate deep and lasting commitments to Baltimore City that are meaningful to us as individuals and as part of the UMBC community. By focusing on Baltimore, we aim to engage with local social justice issues and activism while framing our understanding within the context of larger national movements and ongoing struggles against systemic racism and injustice.

Our campus and our city are not as separate as they may seem at our quiet university—nor are they as readily connected as our proximity and names might lead people to believe. Critical Social Justice: Baltimore 365 knits the UMBC and Baltimore communities together in the hopes of growing into a better UMBC through a better Baltimore.

Critical Social Justice: Baltimore 365 will be held on October 19th through 23rd, 2015. Follow the CSJ blog, Facebook, and Twitter for updates on scheduled events and other news. For more information about the Critical Social Justice initiative, or if you’re organizing a related event that week that might be included on the CSJ calendar, please email womens.center@umbc.edu.

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The deadline to submit your application of interest is Monday, August 3, 2015.

A blog reflection written by Women’s Center student staff member, Carrie Cleveland

For the past ten years I have not had a paying job.  For the past ten years I have been home raising children.  For the past ten years my boss (or bosses) were little people who required me to tend to their every need. That is not a job where anyone gives you money.  There are performance reviews, bonuses, deadlines, and a ton of stress, but no monetary paycheck.

This week I started my first paying job in ten years.  I am the newest student staff member at the Women’s Center.  I am helping to program the Peer Connections Program for Returning Women Students for the next academic year.  Day one was perfect.  I was here on time, got my work done and went home without any drama.  Day two, well that is a different story.

Two hours into my five hour shift I got a phone call from my daughter’s school.  Luckily my husband was home so he could handle the situation, but he seems to forget that I am a work.  I am here to do a job and I am not available to answer every question immediately.  Now, I am not a globe-trotting mechanical engineer like he is, but this is a job and something that means a great deal to me.  So, after a quick little vent to my supervisor, Jess, I realize I may need to set some limits with him.

As I enter the world of a working person again, this means that some things in my home life will change.  I feel like it is a good build up to when I have a full time job as a social worker in a couple of years.  I also think it is great that my three daughters see that mom can do things that are important to her and that my life does not completely revolve around their lives.  So here I am.  A working mom.  Not a title I ever envisioned for myself, but I kinda dig it.

Meet Isabel – the founder of the UMBC Reach Initiative.

This is a guest post written by UMBC rising junior, Isabel Geisler, who is leading the charge for a new initiative on campus called The Reach Initiative.

When I was 4 or 5 years old, I wanted to be an Astronaut. Mostly, because it was the closest career to being a Jedi, but I also loved space, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and theoretical physics.

I remember one night when I was young my sister and I were waiting for our mother to come home from work.  We were excited because on that night, Nova was doing a special on Quantum Physics. There was one part I remember specifically, where the host is pushing up against a wall and telling the audience how theoretically, if he pushed against the wall long enough for thousands and thousands of years there is a chance that he could just push his arm though the solid wall.

This is obviously a gross over-simplification…but for a 5 year old, this was the closest I could get to magic.

“Quantum Physics: The Fabric of the Cosmos” you can still look up the show today, I even found out that the entire episode is actually from a book by Brian Greene. Last winter, I saw it in a used bookstore, but didn’t buy it because I didn’t think I’d understand it. I don’t know when and why specifically I lost interest in pursuing physics, but I’m guessing it started when I got my first ‘B’ in math and I hate to psychoanalyze myself…but this is how it starts off and ends for many young women who were previously interested in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) fields.

When we look at the STEM fields and look at the proportion of women and men who are pursuing degrees you will find that the majority are men. When speaking of primary education, boys are 6 times more likely than girls to have taken engineering. When speaking of college, the gap gets wider. Despite the fact that roughly 58% of all college students are women, in a computer science class men will outnumber women at a ratio of 8:2. When speaking of professional careers, on average, men will hold about 76% of all STEM jobs. These percentages are reflected across the US –including UMBC- and this does not even begin to include the gaps between Women of Color and their representation in the fields.

The STEM pipeline is the term used to describe this phenomenon. At every gap in this pipeline, for example, elementary school to middle school, we see women dropping out of STEM. Many assert that this is simply because women are not interested in a career that is famous for being unsociable and sterile. This is the wrong assumption.  If we were to look at the experiences of many women in STEM, we would find an ongoing trend of implicit bias, discrimination, and a lack of institutional support. The gross underrepresentation of women in the STEM fields is not only unfair, but it is dangerous.  How can our society expect to be innovative when 50% of our intellectual power is missing from the STEM workforce? 

There have been many successful programs that aim to get women interested in STEM, but very few of them acknowledge the inherent bias in the STEM fields that many women struggle with. In the program that I am leading at UMBC, the UMBC Reach Initiative we do not simply want to encourage young women to enter into the STEM fields, we want to retain them. We want to create a network in a world where sometimes that network is non-existent.

For more on the UMBC Reach Initiative, visit their Facebook page!

The Reach Initiative is a yearlong program mentorship and research program for high school women who are interested in entering the STEM fields based on the research by the American Association for University Women, Girls Scouts, and several independent organizations funded by the National Science Foundation.  In our first semester, we will provide our scholars a chance to explore the STEM fields, but we have also infused gender empowerment into the curriculum, with varying topics from combatting micro-aggressions to consent. During the second semester, the young women in our program will work with her UMBC mentor to create a research project that they can enter into science fairs and that they will present to their peers, families, and UMBC faculty at an end-of-the-year banquet.

We are currently looking for mentors for the young women who have decided to be a part of the program. If you are a passionate women attending UMBC who is pursuing a degree in the STEM fields or Environmental Science you can find the application here and a link to our FaceBook page here if you would like to learn more.

If you find yourself unable to apply as a mentor because you are not pursuing a STEM degree, do not have the time to commit, or are a female student please contact me at my e-mail (geisler3 at umbc dot edu) to learn more about how you can contribute or act as a leader as we pursue this project.

We are proud to announce that the annual Critical Social Justice week will be moving to fall semester. We’ll see you Monday October 19th through Friday October 23rd, 2015! Save the date!

Limited Submission Opportunity through the UMBC Office of the Vice President for Research

http://research.umbc.edu/limited-submission-opportunities/

Internal proposals are due by August 28, 2015

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Stipend program provides funding for faculty and independent scholars to pursue research in the humanities during the summer. UMBC may submit up to two nominations for NEH Summer Stipends.

These stipends support individuals in advancing research that is of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. Recipients usually produce articles, monographs, books, digital materials, archaeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly resources. Though this is an NEH program, many faculty members in the arts and social sciences work on projects that the NEH might fund. Summer Stipends support projects at any stage of development.

Successful applicants will receive outright awards of $6,000 to support two consecutive months of full-time research during summer 2016.

For complete instructions: http://research.umbc.edu/neh-2016-summer-stipend-program-internal-proposal-guidelines/